We have just passed through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) brouhaha.

A bill intended to stop theft – an important goal, and a necessary function of government.  But SOPA was overly broad, and deserved in its most recent iteration to go away – which it did.

Because of a bipartisan oppositional uprising – but the two sides arose for very different reasons.

The Theft-Left is vociferously opposed to private property rights.  SOPA is aimed at protecting private property.  So the Left said No.

The Right is loathe to grow government control of anything – including the Web.  And having just witnessed the recent Big Government Network Neutrality Internet power grab, their antennae were highly sensitized – and they said No.

Now, Washington is talking cyber security.  Where there is, again, a legitimate role for government – but we have, again, a bill that defines said role much too broadly.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (and its Senate alternative, the Protect Intellectual Property Act [PIPA]) have been taking a bipartisan beating.  Conservatives have joined with Leftists to savage the bill and thus its chances for passage.

I too am opposed to this iteration of SOPA – it remains too overly broad.

But something similar and more finely, sharply crafted – must become law.  And conservatives will need to reorient themselves when a better version of the bill comes along – and support it.

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We cannot look at the SOPA debate without putting it into the broader context of the immediately preceding Network Neutrality debate.

Conservatives rightly became highly tuned to Internet censorship as a result of the Left’s drive to impose the truly censorious Net Neutrality by any means necessary.

Following so closely on Net Neutrality’s heels, SOPA got swallowed up in this righteous protect-free-speech verve.

But there are some fundamental differences between SOPA and Net Neutrality that must be acknowledged.

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Of wireless Internet bandwidth hogs, that is.

We have for months been odiferously awash in word of the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) “movement.”

Intellectually and ideologically sloven, these gathered gaggles have been commandeering sporadic public spaces (and some private ones) all across the fruited plain.

When asked why they are so doing, you get an inanity cornucopia – think Jay (Leno) Walking or (Jesse) Watters’ World on ignorance steroids.

The only semi-comprehensible – but still factually vacuous – thing to emanate from the whole mess is the 1% – 99% nonsense.

That being the #OWS-ers saying that the upper 1% of Americans control most of the money and power and thusly must be…destroyed?  Certainly taxed and regulated into utter oblivion.

In an always-and-forever failed effort to “spread the wealth around” – misery being the only thing that ever ends up equally distributed.

Work, work ethic and talent never enter the #OWS equation – but then again, why should they?

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The Barack Obama Administration has, since its inception, been moving the United States dramatically leftward, trying to (at the very least) make us a western European socialist entity. Ideologically, a full-on participant in – rather than a rational outlier of – the patently absurd United Nations (UN).

Perhaps the greatest – and worst – example of President Obama’s UN-ing of America was his Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s December 2010 illegal Network Neutrality Internet power grab.

The Administration going to these unlawful lengths to commandeer control of the ‘Net makes it a little more difficult to persuade international autocrats and dictators to leave alone their portions of the World Wide Web.

Or ours.

Which brings us to the United Nations. (more…)

On Friday, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) saved Americans from the extremely hard and dangerous task of having to manually reduce the volume on their TVs during commercial breaks. Thanks to the leadership of Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the government will now regulate the volumes of such advertisements, since apparently American citizens cannot even be trusted to adjust the sound on their television sets appropriately.

Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA)

This regulation follows a series of other liberal proposals designed to reduce the individuality of the American citizen by outsourcing all personal responsibility to the federal government. Whether enforcing new smoking bans, using taxpayer money to campaign against obesity, or paying our bills through welfare checks, the government’s role has expanded well beyond its constitutional authority to protect the citizenry into micromanaging their lives. A federal government must provide services that individual citizens cannot, such as national security, trade agreements with foreign nations, and infrastructure construction.

However, the personal decisions of individual citizens, such as how to quit smoking, lose weight, or cover their expenses, are more efficiently handled when accomplished through individual motivation rather than government mandates. Even if the politicians feel that certain citizens are not making the right choices on some of these decisions, they have neither the right nor the ability to protect us from ourselves. The fact that federal politicians feel they have to intervene in our lives to so great an extent, especially on such a trivial matter as the volume of our television sets, demonstrates the lack of trust they have in the average American citizen. We all have remote controls. Why is it necessary for a government miles away to perform a function that we can all do in our own living rooms?

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$787 billion.  Plus interest.  At downgrade – and thusly increased – rates.

Behold the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – the “Stimulus.”  Brought to you by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their Congressional Democrat cohorts.

Passed in the panicked wake of the 2008 Community Reinvestment Act-Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac-government-induced global economic collapse.  Because “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Passed, we were told, to create “or save” jobs.  In places like non-existent Congressional districts.

Passed, we were told, to keep unemployment below 8%.  How’d that work?

The unemployment rate when Obama took office was 7.6%. The stimulus was passed in February 2009. According to Obama, it was never supposed to go above 8% — well, it was already at 8.1% when the stimulus became a law. And it never got any better. According to the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, the unemployment rate remained high. There were some predictions that it would stay above 9% until 2012 (and this was from the White House no less). The CBO also predicts that the unemployment rate would be 8.2% come November 2012 which is higher than when he took office.

It worked swimmingly.  Drowning-ly, actually.

As we said way back in February:

Government attempting to “assist” the private sector is the D.C. version of the elementary school game Red Light-Green Light.

If the government has given itself the Green Light – and is lumbering and lurching around the free market, blindly and ignorantly throwing around laws, regulations and money – the private sector freezes in place, afraid to move in any direction for fear of the next federal anvil to fall.  The overactive government has thusly emplaced a Red Light in front of the private sector.

Rarely if ever has the federal government been more active than they have been these past two plus years.  And as a result the private sector has been exceedingly timid – which explains why our “recovery” has been so pathetic – if not non-existent.

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Which brings us to the government “helping” the Internet.

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As you may know, the merger process at the FCC and DoJ is a mess.  In fact, some believe the entire process is not much different than extortion.  Not only do we have some newly reported shenanigans going on around the AT&T merger – with FCC staff last week playing fast and loose with data in an effort to sink the merger once and for all – now we have this gem.

To fulfill part of its merger “penance” with the FCC from earlier this year, Comcast / NBC-U announced the other day it has entered into agreements that:

…create new and innovative cooperative news gathering and reporting arrangements with a series of locally-focused, non-profit news organizations.

The partnerships are with ProPublica, which will work with all ten owned stations, serving the following markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., Miami, San Diego and Connecticut; The Chicago Reporter which will work with NBC 5 Chicago; WHYY which will partner with NBC 10 Philadelphia; and KPCC which work with NBC4 LA. (Emphasis and links added)

As I wrote about previously on these pages, the Comcast Merger Order “voluntarily” commits the new company to foster local journalism via the “Voice of San Diego Model,” a socially progressive news organization.  ProPublica, The Chicago Reporter, and KPCC make good on this promise.  They are archetypical liberal media outlets, which are supported in large measure by the usual suspects among America’s top progressive foundations (like Soros, Ford, MacArthur, Knight, Pew, etc.).

What’s amazing is it’s happening as I had predicted – coming just in time to boost progressive messaging for the 2012 elections, all in key urban cities that are vital to Obama maintaining the White House.

Quite a “voluntarily agreed to” platform, huh?  And, go figure, a progressive one at that.  Hmm…

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Harbinger Capital Partners LLC hedge fund just acknowledged its highly political founder Phillip Falcone and other key executives have received “Wells Notices”. Such communications are normally sent by the Securities & Exchange Commission to a target for fraud just before the Justice Department launches a civil and or criminal case. Although the Wells Notice appears to relate to allegations that Mr. Falcone used his hedge fund customers cash as his personal slush fund; an indictment of Mr. Falcone will also inflame the swirling crony capital investigation by the Congress of White House pay-to-play donations in support of a $14 billion scheme to siphon off part of the U.S. military and civilian Global Positioning Satellite (GPS)’s dedicated wireless bandwidth by a start-up company Mr. Falcone controls, called LightSquared.

LightSquared’s business model appeared to be the creation of an entirely new “4G” internet wireless network from the fringe safety zone bandwidth dedicated to the secure military and civilian GPS. Mr. Falcone, his wife Lisa Falcone, and LightSquared Chief Executive Officer Sanjiv Ahuja each made $30,400 political contribution to Democratic campaign organizations in 2010 to allegedly influence Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow the project to proceed under increasingly relaxed standards according to Congressional sources. A letter from Republican House members referred to e-mails between LightSquared representatives and White House officials about attendance at fundraisers for President Barack Obama that coincide with LightSquared contacts: “While some may call it a coincidence, we remain skeptical.”

LightSquared’s FCC operating license had originally included strict provisions intended to ensure the network would be primarily a satellite-based system, with terrestrial components serving as a backup when users were not able to link with a satellite. But these provisions were softened via several license modifications; including the FCC granting LightSquared permission to sell terrestrial-only handsets as a concession to help the company raise billions in financing.

The FCC had ordered testing and Congressional committees on science, armed services and transportation held hearings to determine if the LightSquared plans to offer wireless Internet services to 260 million people would cause harmful interference to GPS operations. In September Congressional investigators asked Jacob Lew, director the Office of Management and Budget and John Holdren, director of the Office of Science & Technology Policy for records of all contacts by LightSquared or its affiliates with staff of the agencies.

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An article in a recent issue of The Economist (“Sweet Land of Subsidy,” December 3rd to 9th, 2011, p. 42) tells the story of Iuka, Mississippi, a small community (2000 pop. 3,059) in Tishomingo County, where the local economic development foundation “invested” an unreported sum of the taxpayers’ money in the mid-1990s to build a 90,000 square foot facility so as to lure a job-creating private employer to the area. Although several call-centers have since “taken a look”, the building never has had a rent-paying tenant and remains vacant nearly two decades on.

The director of the development foundation there blames the county’s failure to attract businesses on the lack of local access to broadband internet connections.

Not to worry, though. In early November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that it would redirect $4.5 billion from a program established to guarantee universal access to landline telephone service to a new “Connect America Fund” (CAF), intended to provide “reliable” broadband internet connections to Americans living in rural areas and, as is obligatory in a period of state-created recession, claiming with a straight face to add 500,000 new jobs and $50 billion to GDP over the next six years.

According to the FCC, 18 million U.S. souls do not now have broadband service, and it claims that 7 million of them can be reached with the new subsidy. The subvention thus amounts to more than $640 per person, assuming that none of the unconnected people live in the same household. (The marginal cost per household is estimated to be $775, although, owing to duplication, the incremental cost of previous subsidies has run as high as $350,000 per house.)

More recently, according to the same article, $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money was spent on rural broadband access. CAF raises the ante by 62.5 percent.

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You know, this whole FCC torpedoing AT&T’s planned T-Mobile merger is nonsense.  As I have written about often, I think the merger’s a mini jobs stimulus plan which can inject jobs into the economy far beyond anything that may happen at the company post-merger.

We sorely need that here in America.  This privately borne proposal is just one such plan, one which would provide some needed fuel for new American jobs.  Up to 96,000 by AT&T’s estimation.

Yet the FCC’s got the company by the proverbial short hairs, firmly believing that its judgment is better than those who are taking the risk and making investments needed to build out new broadband facilities for Americans.  Consequently, as one industry observer dryly noted:

“This is central planning at its most repugnant.”

Yes it is.  And, it’s got some powerful cheerleaders from the media-Marxist crowd jumping up and down with profound excitement.

Leading this pack is the holier-than-thou radicals at Free Press.

Holier-than-thou because, though they claim AT&T’s Washington money has corrupted communications policy, it is they who have raked in millions from murky “progressive” foundations – the latter actively working this past decade to corrupt and “transform” America by laundering – often from hidden / non-transparent sources – approximately $100 million to kneecap telephone, cable and media companies with new rules, regulations and costly proscriptions.

Not surprisingly, Free Press sits atop the list of “media reform” foundation grantees.

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The vote on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J. Res) 6 – the Resolution of Disapproval to undo the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s illegal, unilateral Network Neutrality Internet power grab – is a watershed moment for the members of the Senior Circuit.

The FCC – in fact no federal Agency, Department or Commission – can do anything unless and until Congress writes a law that says “Yo – do this.”

As a unanimous D.C. Circuit Court pointed out in April of 2010, Congress has never done this for the FCC with regard to the Internet and Net Neutrality.

The Commission clearly, simply doesn’t have the juice to do what they again did last December.  It is an egregious overreach, and it must be undone.

Senators – not agencies like the FCC – write laws.  That’s their gig.  Each and every Senator that votes against S.J. Res 6 is giving up on what they asked their constituents to send them to Washington to do.

To vote No is to give up on being an elected representative of We the People.

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Specifically, on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J.Res. 6) – the vote to overturn the Obama Administration Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Net Neutrality Internet power grab.

If you live in Massachusetts – please call/email/fax the Senator and let him know he’d be very wrong to do so.

And that he next year needs Conservatives and Republicans – from Massachusetts and around the nation – if he has any hope to keep his seat.

• Scott Brown – Massachusetts
  • Phone: (202) 224-4543
  • Fax: (202) 228-2646
  • Email: Here

From most appearances, the Senate will this week vote on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J.Res) 6 – the Congressional Review Act Resolution of Disapproval of the Obama Administration Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s illegal Internet Net Neutrality power grab.

Only 51 votes are required for passage – which means only 4 Democrats are needed.  There are 23 Democrat Senate seats up for reelection next year.  A few of these folks aren’t running.  The rest are – many in center or center-right states.  Additionally, there are a few other Senators that should also be subject to Constitutional reason, and thusly contacted.

Behold a list below the fold of some of these Senators and their contact information.  Reach out and tell them to vote Yes on S.J.Res 6.  Also tweet it all out using the hashtag #freethenet. (more…)

President Barack Obama last week unveiled his latest attempt to divert attention away from his horrendously failed economic policies and record.  In his ongoing effort to “fundamentally transform America” and his loomingly piteous campaign to get reelected, the newest phraseology is “We Can’t Wait.”

From his weekly radio address on Saturday:

“The truth is, we can no longer wait for Congress to do its job….So where Congress won’t act, I will.”

There is so much disingenuousness contained in just this tiny excerpt.  The truth is, there is nothing at all new about this.  President Obama has been end-running Congress to unilaterally “fundamentally transform America” since (at least) November 2, 2010. That election day was a stinging, historic rebuke of the Leftist, Big Government policies of President Obama and his Democrats.  Not just in D.C. but throughout the nation, at the state and local levels as well.  It was a crashing, crushing wave that Obama himself described it as a “shellacking.”

We the People elected Republicans in huge numbers up and down the ticket to (amongst other things) serve as a blockade to the Socialism being further emplaced by Donkeys. Unfortunately, the will of We the People remains utterly irrelevant to Obama. After the brutal Congressional slog that was the jamming-through of ObamaCare, over the expressed objections of We the People, the President had enough of the legislative (or constitutional) way of doing things, so he began his regulatory fiat power grabs.

Can’t pass the energy sector-assault that is Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has. Can’t pass the workplace-assault that is the Big Union-payoff Card Check?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)  and Department of Labor will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has.

So for the President this weekend to pretend his democracy denying-dictaorial-ism is something new is mendacious.  He’s been going at it at a pretty good for years and he’s only announcing that he’s now really going to ramp it up. He isn’t tired of “wait(ing) for Congress to do its job.”  He long ago lost any interest in anything having to do with Congress — save their utility as an electioneering punching bag. Congress is in fact doing exactly the job we (in part) elected them to do: Be an impediment to the President’s overarching, overreaching Leftist agenda. And they have been largely successful when Obama isn’t illegally, serially, wantonly going around them.

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We have often discussed the incredible peril Network Neutrality poses when placed in the hands of government — it’s the incredible economic and First Amendment damage that can (and will) be done by the federal Leviathan once it gets its Net Neutrality tentacles around the World Wide Web. Nearly as pernicious, are the private big companies who benefit from big government generally – and the incredible Big Government power grab that is Net Neutrality specifically.

We’ve heard a little about Netflix – the gigantic pro-Net Neutrality Internet movie delivery company.  Netflix is pro-Net Neutrality because Netflix wants grandmothers to pay more to email their grandchildren so that they can continue to use tons and tons of Internet bandwidth to make tons and tons of money – and not pay for it. This is one of the terrible things Net Neutrality does: It prevents Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – the people who spend billions of dollars building and perpetually bettering the highways and byways of the World Wide Web – from charging people who use more bandwidth more money.

Let us disabuse ourselves of a pro-Net Neutrality myth – the Internet Superhighway is not a free ride (nothing, of course, is).  Roads cost money, whether to your house or to your computer and Net Neutrality allows some of the biggest riders to do so without paying for the privilege. Net Neutrality outlaws per-use pricing.  It’s like telling a grocery store they must charge people purchasing one steak the same price as people purchasing fifty. It’s Socialism for the Internet – and we’ll end up with everyone getting equal amounts of nothing. And as we go down, your Grandma’s – and your, and my – Internet prices shoot skyward so as to subsidize the incredible bandwidth hogs like Netflix and Google.

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The current administration’s controversial federal regulatory policies (the US Treasury Department’s stunningly bad bet on Solyndra, the NLRB’s tone death sanction against Boeing, the EPA’s onerous new rules imposed on, well, everything) place heavy-handed bureaucrats in Washington squarely behind the wheel on the road to America’s economic future.  In each of these cases, the White House has empowered federal regulators to decide outcomes best left to the free market.  Washington, it seems, knows best. Against this backdrop of regulatory overreach, we await another major decision – the approval by the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission of the potential merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.

Of economic concern, however, is not the Federal government’s decision to approve or reject the deal, but whether the FCC will use its responsibility and power to approve the deal to also impose new regulations on the entire telecom industry. Doug Holtz-Eakin warns, “already we are seeing calls for a presumptive regulatory response.” He worries that “the U.S. will continue down an overly regulatory, prescriptive approach to competition that is doomed to fail.”

The greatest risk to a free, wide-open Internet is that overreaching regulators are using the merger review process to mandate new policy – circumventing the congressional review process to impose regulatory restrictions such as the controversial “net-neutrality” rules. “The job of regulators should not be to choose the best market strategy,” wrote James Gattuso, a Senior Research Fellow with The Heritage Foundation in a May report.  “It should be simply to make sure that the marketplace itself is working. In wireless, it’s working remarkably well, and there is every reason to believe it will continue to do so after the acquisition is completed.”

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Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen has released a new book: Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – And How to Stop Him.

In this work, Kerpen lays out the Obama Administration’s serial abuse–in fact, outright violation–of our Constitutional republican form of government. President Obama is using the panoply of federal Departments, Commissions, Agencies and Boards to illegally force feed us new “laws.” Yet they aren’t laws at all, as Obama is bypassing Congress and the legislative process.  They are being foisted upon us by executive branch regulatory fiat. This is not democracy but dictatorship, as Kerpen’s excellent tome exhaustively proves.

Here is but a sampling of the research he presents to make his case. Chapter II: Democrats can’t pass the energy sector-assault that is Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has. Chapter IV: Democrats can’t pass the workplace-assault that is the Big Union-payoff Card Check?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)  and Department of Labor will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has.

Chapter V: ObamaCare–which did get shoved, bribed and cajoled through Congress–left WIDE latitude for Health & Human Services (HHS) regulators to go to town on our health care sector. And here’s a shocker; they already are. Chapter VI: The Dodd-Frank financial sector-attack slipped through Congress under cover of economic crash-fueled panic and also left WIDE latitude for a host of regulatory agencies to go to town. Shocker– so are they. And the list goes on, and on, and on… (more…)

It looks like it is finally going to happen. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has finally gotten their net neutrality regulations through the bureaucratic mess, and now it [IS] only a matter of times before they start to take effect.

The National Journal reports:

Open Internet regulations, or network-neutrality rules, have cleared the final regulatory hurdle before getting on the books, a Federal Communications Commission spokesman said on Monday.

The rules, which limit how cable and phone companies can treat legal Internet traffic, are strongly opposed by Republicans in Congress, who have unsuccessfully attempted to repeal them on several occasions.

The FCC passed the regulations in December over Republican objections, creating the defining saga of commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s tenure so far and fulfilling an Obama campaign promise.

The Office of Management and Budget, which had a procedural role in OK’ing the regulations thanks to the Paperwork Reduction Act, had to review new data-collection responsibilities that the rules apply to Internet service firms. “OMB signed off late Friday,” an FCC spokesman said in an e-mail.

One of my life’s maxims is:

Education and knowledge are often mutually exclusive.

With the Barack Obama Administration’s all-out assault on the for-profit higher education industry, one of the books I have long intended to write is becoming ever more true:

College IS for Dummies.

We the People who closely follow politics have assuredly noticed an incessant trend on Talking Head TV.  Very often the Leftist debater is – a college professor.  Often teaching some very Leftist, completely pointless “scholastic” field.

For instance, National Review’s John Derbyshire rightly calls for an end to all collegiate programs that end in the word “Studies.”  Do a little Web search, and you’ll quickly reach the same conclusion.

The point being – college campuses are rife with hard Left ideologues posing as “educators.” Hiding there because their worldview doesn’t jibe with Reality.

And because they are paid handsomely to spout utter nonsense to the next generations – at a $100,000+ premium to the victims…I mean students.

The new meat can’t even get through orientation – the indoctrination is already underway.

Is this claptrap Leftist racket worth your time and considerable coin?  Hardly.

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We have spent the last three-plus years in the Third Age of Bailout.

During which we have spent trillions of public dollars trying to create (“or save”) private sector jobs.

The results have been simultaneously disastrous and completely ineffectual.  And utterly predictable.

We on the Right were all along explaining that we have historical evidence aplenty that the public sector stealing money from the private sector to

1. Waste a goodly portion thereof (as government always does) and then
2. Slosh the remainder around to political supporters and cronies

is not the way to create jobs.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deepened and deeply prolonged the Great Depression by so doing.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson increased and ensconced permanent, intergenerational poverty – by declaring War on and setting us up to spend trillions of dollars subsidizing it.

For resisting this serial economic and governmental folly, the Left has incessantly accused the Right of not having a plan to create jobs.

This ludicrous charge simultaneously reveals two immutable truths:

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